The reason I find this picture interesting is that it’s a perfect blend of the current iPhone design with a bit of telephoniness added in; it’s at the same time elaborate and subtle enough to ring true.

4 mai

Meh. More setting up, more development, but more importantly more delaying with nothing new happening. And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, god oh god why did they have to make him important? I hate him so much.

The backstory was a little too cheesy, but at least things are moving. It’s interesting (and probably a bit sad) that, in an entire episode about xxxx, the cool character was Ben and his twelve seconds of screen time.

Business Week estimates the $100M will be used to buy roughly 50,000 servers. Last month, Data Center Knowledge published a report estimating that the social network currently has around 10,000 servers in operation.

If the memoirs are as authentic as the author says, he must have wanted to kill himself when he saw the movie. Please spare yourselves. Funny, witty writing, with some strong bits in passing; undoubtedly good reading.

Card only wrote Ender’s Game (ie, rewrote it as a full novel) as a prologue to this story, and it shows: the most interesting parts of the first book were the final chapters that laid ground for Speaker, and they felt a little out of place.

For some reason, the author’s introduction spoils most of the science-fiction mystery that’s developed over the entire book, so I strongly recommend you skip it (or maybe that’s what you’re always supposed to do? I don’t know; it’s printed in front of the book, so I just read it first). But then, Card isn’t the most subtle author when it comes to managing suspense, anyway.

The book could probably be a bit shorter (as often happens, I guess), but Card’s obsession with designing and presenting alien lifeforms and their thought processes is as interesting as ever — especially if you skip the aforementioned spoilery introduction.

I only noted this quote because it was funny, coming from an author who’s more famous now for his recent declarations against gay marriage than his books:

Marriage is a covenant between a man and woman on the one side and their community on the other. To marry according to the law of the community is to become a full citizen; to refuse marriage is to be a stranger, a child, an outla, a slave, or a traitor. The one constant in every society of humankind is that only those who obey the laws, tabus, and customs of marriage are true adults.

Funny thing when you read a forty- or fifty-year-old science-fiction story: it feels like it plagiarizes dozens of more recent books or movies. It’s hard to appreciate it fully under those circumstances.

Beyond that, though, it looks like Dick’s science-fiction is not exactly the geeky kind, but more of the poetic, dreamy variety that doesn’t really care about… well, the science part. In Ubik’s case, Dick writes a character who essentially has all the powers of a god, and he never addresses that, and it evidently doesn’t bother him a bit — but it bothers me a lot, and just keeps me out of the story.

And then, there are the long chapters about 1900s-technology that Dick remembers a little too fondly, which is pretty unhealthy for a scifi author.

So fiction blogs were already all the rage in 1966, were they? Like Ubik, the themes and treatments have been reused time and time again in more recent works — but you’ve still got a strong, simple story that works very well (even though I’m not 100% convinced by the narrator’s voice at both extremes of his IQ progression).

Flash finally gets real 3D transforms (and other distort filters). It’s about goddamn fucking time, for crying out loud — that’s probably the first time in years I can’t wait for a new Flash release to be widely adopted. (I still can’t believe the adoption rates for Flash 9. How do they get people to actually update their plugins?)

That’s a very cool idea; I just created a Facebook instance that’s pretty and simple (and focuses on content rather than advertising and stupid notifications) and I’m going to make a Google one just for fun.

P.S. I just realized — Battlestar is so much into mysticism, destiny and all, the Caprica prequel should star Edward James Olmos as the Adama patriarch and Mary McDonnell as his star-crossed lover. Reincarnation and all that.

20 mai

The writing style put me off immediately — too pretentious and flourished, while descriptions are paradoxically lacking (I still only have a very faint idea of what a freaking tree-ship looks like) and the author has an irritating tendency to delay explanations of his sci-fi concepts and vocabulary for hundreds of pages when adding just a few words in passing would have made the reading so much easier — and it all became clearer when the poet character launched into a diatribe about writing, poetry and all that stuff.

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

I don’t care for poetry, I care about story. And the thing is… well, this happens to be a fantastic story (or, rather, collection of full-fledged stories, connected by tightening threads, in a consistent universe). On the other hand, it’s also a story that doesn’t have a fucking end — I was silently shouting “Asshole! Asshole! Asshole!” when I finished reading the last page… but couldn’t resist opening Amazon immediately to order the next volume.

21 mai

An upcoming web application dedicated for webdesigners to communicate with their clients — uploading mockups, commenting and annotating them, and publishing design revisions until the client finally signs off on a final design. The point being that every note and comment is logged and you can shove the client’s nose in their own contradictions.

As often, I wouldn’t really be inclined to use a third-party web app for that kind of thing, but it does look really interesting.

24 mai

Interesting article by a game developer about the middleware that handles Niko Bellic’s movement and makes Force Unleashed troopers grasp each other in stupid aerial ballets. I’d been wondering a lot about Euphoria, and about why it isn’t used by more games (regardless of price, which is pretty much irrelevant compared to current game budgets), so reading a developer’s take is enlightening.

It’s not engine plug-n-play friendly. A programmer from Natural Motion supposedly needs to be embedded in your team for around six months.

Corollary: When they’re widely adopted, video comments could also double as an IQ filter; just ignore all video comments and you’ll be rid of most of the morons participating in that particular comment thread. It actually is easier to not play an embedded video than to not read an idiotic comment.

A pretty screen saver for geeks (if you’ve enjoyed Helvetica, the movie, then you have no choice but to download this) that goes to the trouble of being very extensively customizable — and available in 18 languages.

That’s the new screensaver on my iMac (my Mac mini still runs Twistori, although I’m getting tired of it).

28 mai

They could have spared us the hours of pseudo hesitation and forced suspense to reach the conclusion that was obvious the moment they talked about xxxx stepping down. (Oh wait, it couldn’t have been hours, could it? But it felt like it. Not enough Sixes in the counselor’s quarters.) And to make matters worse, the whole process was a setup to get Lee to recite another of his damn annoying pleas. I’m pretty sure I saw him talk on there, but I have no idea what the words were.

So… they haven’t invented beacons yet, have they? I figure that was secondary to not finding a cure for cancer.

As much as I complained about Simmons’ pretentious writing, going back to Card’s childishness was a little painful in the beginning. It didn’t help that at least a hundred of the novel’s pages are just reminders of what happened in the previous books. Or it’s about goddamn midichlorians.

Yet once again the second half of the story is great, and I’m quite happy I stuck through the first chapters. I’m stopping there, though; this book’s ending is final enough for my taste (even though it clearly leaves a door open for its sequels), and I’m getting just a bit weary of reading the same plot over and over in each book of the series — aliens are just misunderstood, whether they’re man-killing insectoids, man-killing swinoids or man-killing bacteriods, let’s live and let live, and can’t we all just get along?

What do you know — Windows 7 is basically an iPhone inside Vista. (Or you could say it’s Microsoft Surface on a laptop/desktop if you’re more pro-Microsoft than pro-Apple, but then you wouldn’t be reading my blog.)

What I love about the demo video is that photo manipulation on a Dell laptop is way more laggy than on an iPhone. And I also like the implication that there’s no way we won’t get Apple multitouch computers in or before 2009.

29 mai

I just can’t believe how cool this looks — and how unabashedly they’ve taken inspiration from the iPhone in the way it handles gestures and finger flicks. In only six months, Android demos have gone from “a better Windows Mobile” (an easy goal) to what you could very arguably qualify as “a better iPhone” (and it pains me to write this). I really never expected Google to go for Apple’s jugular like that, and the next few months are going to be very interesting.

I guess that’s why I still watch Lost: despite all the crap they keep pulling, every once in a while they manage to have great moments. I didn’t think I’d care about any of what was gonna happen — none of which was a surprise, except for the Searcher — yet they managed to sell it all so well.

My immediate, and stupid, reaction to the first mention of the deceased’s name was to google it because it had to be a character I’d forgotten from earlier in the show (hence the “stupid,” because what are the chances of that, really?), so I completely spoiled myself on that one, but in the end I don’t think it made the double episode any worse — I hate that kind of artificial suspense anyway.

31 mai

I’m not sure where the video was originally posted, because so many morons repost the same video over and over (with, of course, extensive quality loss each time) so I’ll just settle on College Humor because the image quality is fine and the player runs better on my machine than YouTube’s.

I’d seen links to that video before, but never viewed it before I happened upon a blog that spoiled the ending; so I won’t spoil it but still encourage you to watch it.